Tuesday Jan 13, 2009

As the throngs of screaming brendan fans beginning to fade outside Fishworks headquarters, we are happy to announce the first software update for the 7110, 7210, and 7410. See Cindi's blog for more details.

Turns out Sun uses SSDs tailored both for write performance to handle an internal logging function and then read optimized SSD to act essentially as a really large cache. All wrapped around their open-source ZFS file system hidden within the storage subsystem. Sun is demonstrating technology leadership by tightly integrating SSD technology into a complete storage subsystem - yes others have done a pluggable replacement for a HDD, but that's fairly obvious and less then optimal.

Thursday Nov 20, 2008

While you can keep up with the feed of fishworks-tagged blogs, here are some recent posts by Fishworks engineers that you may have missed:

Greg talks about SAS, SATA, and JBODs all work together. And to anyone who thinks it's easy to "roll your own" cluster with SATA disks in a SAS JBOD, be sure to sit down with Greg (and Keith) for an enlightening/mind-numbing discussion about SATA affiliations.

In his continuing quest for sympathy over the difficulty of lighting an LED (often called the "last problem" in computer science), Eric describes the final pieces needed to provide a coherent user experience for managing disks and faults.

Bill discusses the design and features of managing administrative users on the appliance, though he leaves on a cliff hanger - the true power of role-based access control (predicted to be a ratings monster) is put off until the next entry.

While venting his frustration over the Perl's resemblance to "a reeking metropolis like Lagos or Nairobi", Bryan provides insight into the history and power of the CLI.

In case you missed it, be sure to check out Mike's RAS whitepaper that describes a smorgasbord of features that keep your data safe and you informed about all the problems (or hopefully lack thereof) on all Sun Storage 7000 systems.

New tools are now available for storage administrators considering the 7410, in addition to the much-heralded appliance simulator VM:

The Sun Storage 7410 Power Calculator, which allows you to spec out your system, (including JBODs), and determine its active idle and sample power consumption based on estimated workload.

Adam has created a space calculator for use with the VM, to help determine how much usable capacity is delivered for a given RAID level, number of JBODs, and any Logzilla devices on 7410-based systems.

Monday Nov 17, 2008

The Fishworks engineering team gathered with our spouses and significant others last night to commemorate our 1.0 release with a celebratory dinner at Town Hall in San Francisco. Defying statistical probability, all eighteen attendees ordered the pork chop entrée.

These presentations are designed for the CEC audience, and are not intended
for general customer use. Many of them were accompanied by demos and
discussions, but hopefully the slides themselves will be of interest to some.